That's what earth looks like in this photo taken from space, apparently with cloud cover removed:
It's beautiful in a way, but it's also a shame. All those lights obscure the night sky for modern viewers to the point where when we look up on a clear night we see only a fraction of what observers could see a hundred years ago. The real beauty, the beauty we're missing, is not the lights on earth, but the lights in the Milky Way.
